Oxygen and Ozone
by Inkfire
Summary: In a dance out of pace or a maze of a path, they find each other through time. River's journey in scattered order, to husband, father and mother. Written for the fanwork exchange Eleventyfest on Dreamwidth.


**This fic was written for the wonderful ****fanwork exchange Eleventyfest, on Dreamwidth. My recipient was lovelythings / leiascully on AO3. Three separate parts on the theme of found families, for my prompter's first request: River with Eleven, Amy and Rory.**

**Just for the record, for the second and third I picked sentences from the book ****_The Bell Jar_****, which I used as prompts: for the second it was "I couldn't find my father anywhere", and the third: "I had the impression that it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end." (Used as inspiration.)**

* * *

"Hello," he half-giggles, eyes wide, taking her in like he's seeing her for the very first time.

In a way he is. In a way, all those meetings out of order she might or might not know herself, they've been leading him here. They've been chasing each other across time and this is where they're found.

Demon's Run is where she begins. The irony of it could hurt like hell. She holds it at arm's length and decides that this is a gift. This moment, his face are a gift.

"Hello," she replies, allowing all the heat and softness that are bubbling inside of her to buzz into her voice.

He laughs, delighted. His hand has shifted from under hers in his usual messy moves. She doesn't mind—she knows it will be returned.

_Hello. You know now. And you know that you're mine._

She looks down at the cot as he runs off to find her. Cradled here is her past, her identity.

All that's been stolen is one day returned.

She breathes, and turns to face the Ponds.

* * *

The swing creaks under her weight in the drizzly evening.

River ghosts her fingers across the rusty chain, a phantom of a touch. She once grabbed them with other hands, wilder hands, small and brown and demanding. She once pulled and flew and fell, spitting out her hair, refusing to cry. She shouted at the sky.

He is on his way back from work. She is on her way from nowhere to further off, a-drifting across space, on a whim.

She doesn't call out to him, but sits and hopes. His eye finds her. His feet hesitate, his path diverts from straightness into a helpless, unsure curve. He pulls it together, swallows and makes a beeline towards her.

The swing moans as he sits down carefully.

"What brings you here?" he asks.

She shrugs. _The southern wind. A few pulls and twists on my vortex manipulator. The smell of the rain and the eyes of this man I've just seen on Pandatorea, holding his baby._

"A bit of everything," she says truthfully, and sees his jaw tense and his mouth tighten. That answer does not help him and that answer is all she has, all she is. A blur of a daughter, fragments to pick up. A shadow—a presence and a missing space. The air she stirs along her way.

"I've been going here and there," she tells him. "Acres of planets and stars and soil and empty places. I thought I'd like to see it all. They made me a doctor, you know. Archaeology—I pull things from the earth, from the past, get to know them and they become books, stories, knowledge. It's like running after shadows, but it's a good life. It leaves a trace. A legacy."

He nods, and a veil like a memory passes across his features. She wonders what she's told him of herself before, other, older versions of her.

She takes a deep breath to let him in further. It's like a whole other journey.

"So I've been looking and picking up things," she continues. "Parts of other people, parts of who I am. Like a puzzle, you work out the frame and then sort out the pieces."

Another breath. "I couldn't find my father anywhere."

He looks up at that and she hurries before he can speak. "So I figured I must be looking at the wrong places. And well, I came here."

She sees him take it in, sees the bob of his Adam's apple and the uncertainty in his eyes. She has more words on her lips, a tempest of speech she's had piled there for a while, stacked in a corner between work and dreams and fear and night—there's the Doctor and there's Amy, and here is Rory's corner, made of quietness and half-moments, tugging at her heart. But she knows she has to hold it in. She's talked a lot already, cannot help it. It's running and rolling from her in great waves and she vows to be careful, not to pull him under and drown him in her desperation.

"You were probably right," he agrees in a bit of a croak, clearing his throat. "Here would be the place to look."

She peers at him. This Rory is back from work and off to his and Amy's house, but he isn't as settled as other versions she's seen, still running after confidence and watching it fly from between his fingers. He is wrapped in the hold of reality too, a bit detached from her errant life. Their years without the Doctor. She's been tempted to aim further, meet in a mayhem, bond over saving each other's life. This isn't Rory's way, however and she knew it too well to entertain the fantasy for too long. She's also been tempted to reach him later still, a Rory who would know and be close to her. A Rory who wouldn't be scared. Easy as breathing—she can feel herself in fragmented parts, not whole yet, a noisy clutter of River Song, roaring with gunfire and pulsing with energy and alive, incomplete, searching. She yearns for Rory, both for himself and as a healing touch. Rory holds people together like gentle gravity. She's seen it with Amy.

She knows better than to seek this, that easy way out. Rory will know her because she will have let him see, accept her if she opens up and shows him his place into her world. Before she enjoys it she has to create it, do the exhausting work of dancing around each other. Time in reverse doesn't offer pre-built relationships, just delivers their precarious frame, the shifting ground on which to find and hold a balance, clinging by fingertips. She cannot rely on its flow with certainty.

Time will give and take, and it is up to her to reach out to him in-between, find the paths and ways from Demon's Run to Leadworth and from father to daughter.

As she ponders, he struggles with his hands on his lap and hers resting around the chain, and knowing her yet not. She isn't sure she should make the move. Too early, perhaps. She isn't sure whether to keep talking or let him do his part of the job, edging past the doors she's nudged open, little by little.

Her human nurse of a father is bigger and deeper to puzzle out than any cryptic language she's ever had to decipher. She knows him—from a distance. It isn't enough.

"I remember that swing," he says.

She laughs at that. "It was our place, wasn't it. The odd Leadworth kids—you, me, and Amy. All those times I fell and you tried to nurse me better."

"You wouldn't have that."

She pauses and swallows. "I couldn't. I couldn't stop. I couldn't let you in."

He slowly, slowly nods, accepting. "We were just kids." A corner of his mouth twists. "All of us."

"It was all of me you could have, back then," she replies carefully. "I'm sorry it's not enough."

"It's okay," he whispers. It is not, but they will have to do with it.

His hand does the journey and closes around hers. They both pretend the moment is natural as he squeezes and she carefully squeezes back. "Amy still calls you Melody sometimes," he says. "Don't tell her I told you."

"But you don't, do you."

"No." He swallows. "I'm sorry—I really couldn't."

"That's all right," she breathes. She'll be River to him, another daughter, separate from the child he's held too little. She thinks that's best. She isn't really Melody anymore.

But she breathes the Leadworth air. As Mels she belonged here, restless as she was. She thought she was running loose, thrown into a race, pulled by the fire in her gut and the craving to let it out, let it spread. But she always had her parents to anchor her.

Amy and her belong here because Rory does. Unlike the Doctor, she couldn't track him down in books to ease her nerves and give herself the confidence of already-gathered knowledge. Rory wasn't made by a centurion outside a box. That lone, distant silhouette is but an otherworldly projection of the little boy who knelt by the side of two reckless, restless girls everytime they fell, not giving up when they pushed him away.

She doesn't tell him that. It doesn't need telling. He doesn't need comparing to define who he is.

He is Rory and he's her father and they hold hands as night falls around them.

"You should come in," he offers after a while. "For a cup of coffee. Stay a bit."

River smiles. "I'd like that.

* * *

The windows are shut, and the lights very bright, throwing everything into focus and leaving no room for shadow.

Amy's hair, in the electrical glow, shines like fire and make her look ever so pale. Curled up in the armchair, she seems exposed and yet faraway, her face expressionless. River waits for her acknowledgement.

Amy blinks. She still sits there, out of time, but her bubble shifts and swells to include her daughter. River sees emotion in very brief flashes on the edges of her features—jaw, nose, lips; just crispations, widened pupils for a maelstrom of thoughts. Amy leans forward.

"Hi." Her voice is low, hoarse and weary.

River moves to sit on the arm of her chair. "Hi."

The silence stretches a bit longer, as they hover there considering. "Well, he did that for me," Amy says in the end. "Left everything we might need to start a life—and sent my daughter. I asked him that, you know."

"Yes." In a flash, River can see him again, giving her the exact hour on Earth, sending her in time for the moment when her mother would need her—fallen, as she was, out of the fairytale. Back to Leadsworth, back home, back to standing still as the planet rushed under her feet, waiting and yet no more. She wonders if she can make a difference.

"Amy asked for her daughter to visit her sometime," he said, each word stressed and carefully quoted, his eyes boring into hers. So she had, but which daughter had she hoped for…

Amy's long fingers close around hers and squeeze. Swallowing hard, she squeezes back.

"How are you doing?" she asks.

A crisp laugh. "You know. Getting by."

"You can do this, Amy, you know," she insists. "Have a life. This life."

"With Rory." Her mother's eyes drift shut. "I think I'm scaring him."

"He'll always be there. At your side."

"I'm being a little selfish, am I not?"

"He understands."

Amy's lips twist upwards. "Does he? This is his dream. The house, the home, the—"

She quietly chokes. River closes her eyes and breathes. One, two, three seconds, clinging to her mother's pale hand.

Amy shakes her head as though to pull back from some dark dream. "I don't know how to do this anymore," she confesses under her breath. "I never really did."

"You'll figure it out."

"You would know, wouldn't you?" Amy peers at her, past a curtain of flaming hair, and tries for a smile. Succeeds, too.

River smiles back at her. "Oh, I always know."

"Shut up, young lady." Amy swats her and the high, crystalline sound of her laughter makes them both freeze for a second. They exchange a look.

Breathing, sitting there together, past the fears and lacks and perceived inadequacies. They can make it indeed, perhaps. Believing it seems too wide a leap, but then again, she's never been afraid to fall.

("I am the last person she would wish to see—one more she's lost," she told the Doctor and she was _wrong _for once.

"She's lost her baby. Not you. Not yet, not if you don't let her.")

When she turns her head, Rory is hovering in the doorway, staring at them. Quickly, she throws him a smile. "Come in, Rory."

He moves, uncertainly, to the other arm of Amy's chair, his shadow crawling in the white light. Amy grips his hand, too.

River looks around the room, the cocoon of brightness. Here, for now, they sit together, only carried by the secretive rumble of the Earth's rotation.

Amy, between them, breathes and holds on tighter.


End file.
